The highly constructed garments created by the Anglo-American Charles James (1906–1978)—who is the subject of a new retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are such feats of fabric engineering that they can stand up by themselves. This is all the more striking in view of the era in which he reached the height of his career. During the 1930s, women’s clothing was generally limp and clinging, but James was able to achieve strong, sculptural shapes with stiff materials like grosgrain and taffeta that stood away from the body.

If there was one subject that obsessed the Japanese master film director Kenji Mizoguchi it was that of women sacrificing themselves for their men. He was himself a great patron of brothels and geisha houses, but he felt so strongly about the awful fate of women that he once stood up in a room full of prostitutes and begged their forgiveness.

Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
As the first heavy fighting began in eastern Ukraine in early May, there has been a growing sense that a larger confrontation, one that could involve Russia and the West, may be unavoidable. Such a perception is a terrible mistake. There is nothing inevitable about the future course of the conflict. It is absolutely essential for Western governments to focus on what they can do to avoid war, preserve democracy, and keep Ukraine united.

The new Broadway play All the Way presents President Lyndon Johnson dominating Congress and, through a combination of willpower, guile, wit, and near-bribery, browbeating it into passing the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. But this isn’t what happened.

Most writers complain about the people who come to hear them talk. Or rather the questions they ask. It’s time to wonder whether these people are really asking dumb questions. Why are writers so determined to focus exclusively on their novels, as if there were no continuity between writing and life?

Over the past week, a shocking debate has raged in Pakistan, in full view of the Pakistani people, about the nature and power of the Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, the country’s elusive, military-operated spy agency, which has been blamed for the attempted assassination of journalist Hamid Mir, who hosts one of Geo TV’s most popular current affairs programs.

According to credible accounts, Obama has overseen the killing of several thousand people in drone strikes since taking office. Why only admit to the four Americans’ deaths? Is the issue of targeted killings only appropriate for debate when we kill our own citizens? Don’t all human beings have a right to life?

Talk to people manning the anti-government barricades in eastern Ukraine, and one thing in particular is scary. They talk as though they were a long persecuted minority, as if they have forgotten that easterners under former president Viktor Yanukovych ran the country until February. All they seem to register is a hysterical drumbeat from Russia about the new Nazis of Kiev and their NATO masters.

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three,” Nabokov writes in Lolita. I found myself wondering how many other parentheses like this there were: windows in a wall of verse or prose that suddenly open on an expanse of personal pain. Masquerading as mere asides, they might hold more punch than parentheses are usually expected to hold, more even than the surrounding sentences, and have all the more impact for their disguise as throwaways.

The powerful findings of Thomas Piketty and other economists have challenged long-held assumptions that America is a meritocracy. But the problem of inequality is an inadequate description of the situation. We now have stagnating incomes for a large majority of Americans and runaway incomes at the very top. This is not so much “inequality” as a complete lack of growth for much of the country.